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If you have ever worked late on an Excel analysis that required extensive data manipulation or mappings and wondered “could there be a better way?”, then this blog post is for you.

The integration of Microsoft Excel with Planning Analytics, powered by TM1 Server, remains one of the most powerful pieces in the overall planning, modeling, and other solution capabilities provided by Planning Analytics! In a recent webinar of the same name, which you can find in our QueBIT video catalog, we focused on that integration and made a strong case for the Planning Analytics for Excel add-in as the Excel integration standard-bearer, going forward.

If your scenario is such that you are an “on-premise” TM1 or IBM Planning Analytics user and have been “living” in Perspectives and Architect and, until recently, been very happy, but now find that you are struggling, having been pushed unexpectedly into a full time “working from a remote location” situation, you are not alone. The truth is, Perspectives was never designed to work over a WAN (Wide Area Network), across the internet, through a VPN or from most remote locations.

“Working from home” is all over the news right now. A quick web search yields a broad selection of articles with titles like “What you need to know to start working from home (Forbes)” and “How to work from home without losing your sanity (CNN)”. As a consultant who has mostly “worked from home” for the last 12 years, I can confirm that most of the tips are quite good, albeit repetitive.

It’s March 2020, and many companies are facing the reality that the carefully crafted financial plans and budgets they started the new year with are suddenly, and dramatically, out of date. While it’s common to re-forecast after a quarter, it’s less common to have to revisit ALL your budget assumptions wholesale, as many organizations are now scrambling to do.

Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP, software is used by businesses of all sizes to support its financial and operational business processes. Most vendors offer a menu of modules that can be combined so that data flows seamlessly from one to another, mirroring information flow through the business.

Since spreadsheets were invented in the 1980s, they have been the tool of choice for anyone doing planning and analysis. Financial analysts use them for the annual budget, the long-term strategy plan, allocations, profitability modeling etc. Sales and operations planners use them for capacity planning, sales planning, scheduling and much, much more.

Since Design Thinking is a methodology growing in popularity and being taught at leading universities around the world, I thought it would be a worthwhile topic to explore. Just what is this design thinking and how does it compare to other mythologies, such as Agile?

Way back in 2014, I offered some ideas for when there was a need to conduct a performance assessment of a TM1 model with limited time or budget. This scenario often still arises, even though TM1 has evolved into IBM Planning Analytics, so I thought it might be interesting to revisit some of my original recommendations to see if they may still be helpful.